As she struggled to jump start her career by way of a short stint on American Idol, the 32-year-old singer resisted publicly sharing her sexuality. Eden says she was informed that remaining closeted was the only way to ever make it in a notoriously heteronormative genre. “If you want to keep your career, you need to keep this quiet,” Eden recalled being told in a March interview with the Washington Post.
But Eden says that closing herself off came at a price and backfired on her career. Keeping her relationship a secret made her physically sick and culminated in a break from touring after getting ulcers from stress. “I was bottling up all this stress and lying and being such a small percentage of who I was,” she told PinkNews.
Eden told Washington Post after period of heavy self-reflection last year that included reading queer author Glennon Doyle’s memoir Untamed (relatable!) she realized she couldn’t continue sectioning off her life.
“I had this really introspective moment where I was like, ‘I’m asking everyone around me to change without doing anything about it,’” she tells Attitude. “I hope that being out and visible to the public, I can help other queer people who might live in the middle of nowhere and feel like they’re the only ones.”
Eden is one of a string of country artists who have come out in recent years, and she joins a growing effort encouraging the industry, and specifically country radio, to be more inclusive. In February, T.J. Osborne, one half of the duo Brothers Osborne, came out in an interview with Time magazine, becoming the only openly gay artist at a major country label.
Now, though, Eden can’t get enough of speaking and singing publicly about her queerness. “It became no question to me as to why my music didn’t work the first time around, because I wasn’t able to be fully me,” Eden told the Washington Post, pointing to her recent singles as a new beginning. “Hilary is such a huge part of my life, and she’s such a huge part of my happiness, that there’s no way that I can’t talk about her now. I wouldn’t be able to put out this music if I didn’t talk about our love.”
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